No task or hurdle has ever been too daunting for Mr. Alexander. In his mind, no problem has ever been too big to solve.

If a school lacks a well-formed curriculum, write one. If advanced students want to be challenged, challenge them. If low-ability students need specialized teaching, cater to their needs. If the school culture divides students, create a program to unite them.

Even with cancer, long-time Boulder Valley teacher Scott Alexander is looking at the bigger picture.

"The trip is worth the journey," Alexander, 61, said last week, sitting in his living room with his wife, Gina, at his side and his children and grandchildren smiling down at him from frames on the wall. "I loved my job."

"Every day," Alexander said, "I had love. How many people can say that?"

Scott started his career as a new college graduate teaching social studies at Fairview High and then switched over to Boulder High after a decade to continue teaching history and leading education reforms. He returned to Fairview after 14 years to pull together the school's new International Baccalaureate program before retiring in 2003 -- only to be recruited that same year to run the middle school program at Boulder County Day School, a private school in Boulder.

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Fueled by strong beliefs that middle school education is lacking and those students' minds need to be challenged and stimulated, Alexander in 2006 earned Boulder County Day approval as an International Baccalaureate Middle Years school -- one of only a few in the state.

Today, thanks in part to Alexander's leadership, Boulder Country Day is the only school in Colorado to be accredited by the Association of Colorado Independent Schools and have IB approval, according to head of school Mike Shields.

"Scott came in at a crucial time when our middle school needed to find its focus," Shields said. "He helped it become the excellent school it is today."

On Monday, during a dedication ceremony that school officials expect to be well-attended, Boulder Country Day will rename its middle school "Scott Alexander Middle School."

"It is a testament to the energy and effort that he put into creating our middle school program," Shields said, adding that enrollment has grown by about 40 percent since he came to campus. "It's because of his leadership and his ability to attract quality teachers."

Alexander was diagnosed in 2004 with renal cell carcinoma -- a cancerous kidney. He had it removed and was in remission until 2008, when he learned the cancer was back and growing through the lower part of his spine. It had spread to his liver, lungs and abdomen.

He's been fighting it, but had to stop working in the fall to focus on his health.

"It has been extremely hard on the faculty and all of us who know him and care about him so much," Shields said, adding that Alexander has "left the school in an outstanding position to move forward."

'If you teach, you teach to everyone'

Fairview High opened at its current location in 1971, and Alexander started there in 1972.

"I had never seen anything like that," Alexander said. "The gloss was still on it."

Even though he was fresh out of college, Alexander had great expectations for any school he worked at and developed a socials studies curriculum and even created a few classes -- like Asian studies. He also created the school's first advanced-placement history course and led classes for low-ability readers.

"Lots of teachers say, 'I don't know if you've got what it takes to be in my class,'" Alexander said. "But then you're not a teacher. If you teach, you teach to everyone."

Alexander moved over to Boulder High in 1982 when Fairview's enrollment was dropping, and he continued to push the envelope there. Alexander joined a committee of teachers who wanted to reform the district's education and visiting other schools to get ideas of what worked and what didn't. During their visits, they encountered the IB program, and something became obvious, Alexander said.

"Why aren't we doing this?" he said. "They're teaching by best methods with a global perspective."

When Alexander took the idea to the Boulder High administration, however, he said they thought "it would be a lot of work."

"Yeah, but it's worth doing," he said.

Boulder High was still refusing to move toward implementing an IB program when Fairview approached the school board and asked to become an IB school. Alexander attended all of the IB training meetings for Fairview teachers and ended up being an IB-certified teacher at a school without the IB program.

So he moved back to Fairview in 1996, where he taught IB classes and became involved in student council. The kids griped about the student council culture, so Alexander made drastic changes and decided to implement a program that would close the social gap between high school seniors and freshmen. Enter the "Link" program, a student-run initiative to match seniors with freshmen during the start-of-the-year orientation.

"That spun the school around," he said. "It had a huge impact."

'I never had a history teacher like him before'

Alexander retired from the Boulder Valley School District in 2003 and was soon recruited to the Boulder Country Day School. There, he continued following the same high standards that had guided his career.

Lizzy Hardwick, 16, said Alexander's unexpected arrival at Boulder Country Day forever shaped her outlook.

"My mom and I have created a list of the awesome men who have affected my life, and Mr. Alexander is high on that list," she said.

Lizzy, who is now a junior at Niwot High School, was in Alexander's eighth grade history class. He also directed the school while she was there, and Lizzy said she always felt a connection with him.

"I consider myself a poet, and I felt that I could really relate to him because he told me that he was interested in poetry too," she said. "He sort of seemed like a Renaissance man because he was a poet and a historian and an artist."

Alexander went out of his way to engage his students, recreating historic events and bringing in artifacts.

"I never had a history teacher like him before and haven't had one since," she said. "He made it feel like history was happening as he spoke."

Lizzy was at the middle school when Alexander was pushing it into IB mode, and she said all of her classes started to interconnect. Topics in her literature class began to correspond with her history class. Even her art teacher would have students create things related to the other classes.

"He built it into one cohesive intellectual experience that was spectacular," she said. "He really knew how to make us feel like we wanted to learn."

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